PSOE: domestic exile?

"The Socialist Party needs a constituent process, a total recasting from scratch to climb out of the domestic exile into which it has slumped." So says Joan Romero, secretary-general of the Valencian Socialists in the 1990s. "Domestic exile" pretty much defines the PSOE's state of disorientation: stumbling from nowhere to nowhere in a country that, a little over a year ago, it still governed.

The air is smoky after the national party's recent confrontations with the Catalan and Galician Socialists, and now the Ponferrada case, which sums up the PSOE's disorientation. It might seem too local a problem to assume such dimensions, but it is turning out to be a real expression of their mental morass: no mission, no ideology, no authority; capable of selling their dignity for a municipal plate of beans, incompetent in their selection of personnel.

Samuel Folgueral, the new Ponferrada mayor expelled from the PSOE for having obtained a council majority by doing a deal with a right-wing councilor convicted of sexual harassment, says he has done nothing wrong because his move was entirely legal. This is an old song: what is legal is moral. Yet he was selected by the PSOE to head their municipal slate. And the PSOE allowed him to become mayor. Only when the scandal broke in the media did they start shamefully backpedalling. The thing in itself is grave enough: according political recognition to a man who harassed a woman until she filed a complaint (she later had to leave town). Very serious, too, is the fact that the motion of censure against the previous (PP) mayor, brought into the council with the support of the harasser's vote, took place without anyone in the PSOE speaking out. It shows just how catatonic the party has become. They seem to be asleep, out to lunch, disconnected. Grave, too, that nobody has stepped forward to take the blame. Óscar López, "number-three man" in the party, is the official scapegoat, but is pathetically saying that nobody has accepted his resignation. Nobody can stop you from resigning if you really want to.

A local case has become the symbol of the general debacle. The alarm signals keep coming: the PP is freefalling in the opinion polls, yet the PSOE hardly rises, indicating that the illness is serious, and that the public just cannot see the PSOE as an alternative to the discredited right. The PSOE has been letting time go by, with the excuse that the catastrophic results of its last government are too fresh in the public's memory. But the Ponferrada case shows that the problem is structural: the PSOE organization lacks the energy to react. But the PSOE has to react and recover, because the country cannot live without an alternative to an arrogant, authoritarian PP. We need the PSOE to balance the scales, and to reform the jammed political system established in the 1978 Constitution soon after Franco's death. This is why the PSOE needs a profound recasting. Wherever you go in Spain, there is no way out, other than a real constituent process to completely recast an organization that is now bureaucratized, hijacked by tight little power cliques at every level, which operate as mechanisms of exclusion.

The alarm signals keep coming: the PP is freefalling in the opinion polls, yet the PSOE hardly rises

Precisely because things are so bad, a recasting is possible. To get back on top you have to be alive, and the PSOE is breathing its last. We can only hope that the sedated patient has enough survival instinct left to opt for its only chance. But it can't wait, if the reconstruction of the left is to happen within what used to be this country's genuine social-democratic party. If not, others will step in. Reinvent yourself: this is the challenge. For this, you have to open doors and windows. This is a huge task, but preferable to languishing in domestic exile - that is, in growing irrelevance.